Roy Greenslade: Press freedom is being frustrated as privacy becomes new libel

Democracy and press freedom go hand in hand. They are indivisible. It does not mean the press, or news media to use the modern term, can do as they like.

There is an acceptance by news-gatherers in western democracies — even in the US, which is blessed with the First Amendment — that we should obey certain rules in order to curb misbehaviour.

Those of us who greeted the digital revolution at its outset were quick to realise that it offered a liberating way to extend press freedom. It would enable everyone to have a voice.

Its content would cross frontiers into lands where freedom was unfairly circumscribed. It would undermine dictators everywhere, be they home-grown media tycoons or foreign dictators.

But the forces of reaction, the counter-revolutionaries, were unsettled by this technological miracle and have now discovered an unexpected ploy to halt freedom’s advance.

Politicians, business leaders and now judges have chosen to champion personal privacy as a way of frustrating press freedom. Under the guise of protecting people from the supposed ill intentions of the media, they are engaged in reversing the move towards openness in a new age of enlightenment.

Nowhere is this trend more obvious than in Europe, in the European Court of Justice to be precise, and here in the UK, with a piece of legislation, the Data Protection Act, that has a potential for harm too few of us have previously realised.

The ECJ’s decision, the “right to be forgotten” ruling, gives people the opportunity to have material removed from the archive of the world’s most used search engine, Google.

To comply with that ruling, Google’s European division last week began the process of de-indexing certain articles. It came to light because Google informed the relevant publishers.

Some of the deletions made no sense. For example, a whole series of my Guardian blog articles for a week in October 2011 were removed. It was impossible to know who had complained, let alone why.

I’m all for people protecting their privacy but that is very different from trying to erase history. We just have to accept the sins of our past.

Many complainants probably wish they kept quiet anyway because, as result of the publicity, many more people are now accessing articles they wished to delete.

Just as sinister is the internal threat to press freedom through data protection. The DPA is one of Britain’s least understood laws. Its aim is admirable — its possible effect is alarming.

Under proposals drawn up by the Information Commissioner’s Office, journalists would find their hands tied.

They would, for example, be required to warn public figures in advance that they were the subject of an investigation.

As it stands, people are citing the DPA when demanding to know about, and even to have access to, material obtained by journalists prior to publication.

Anyone subject to an investigation can go to court to frustrate the journalists or prevent them from continuing their inquiries. The threat to journalism when wealthy people take increasingly cash-strapped publishers to court is obvious.

Privacy has become the new libel, and the loser in the long run will be the people who misguidedly think of “the media” as some kind of homogeneous evil institution. In fact, it is there for them, not against them.

Roy Greenslade is Professor of Journalism, City University London, and writes a blog for the Guardian